Which Wikileaks?
December 18, 2010 6:01 PM   Subscribe

What _were_ the biggest revelations from the Iraq War Logs and leaked US cables, anyways?

I heard a lot about the Wikileaks documents confirming a lot of what people had suspected was going on behind the scenes during the Bush years, but I don't know any of the specific things that were confirmed. What were the major revelations from the leaks, especially those that confirm these assumptions?
posted by LSK to Society & Culture (10 answers total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wikipedia has a good summary of information released by Wikileaks.
posted by dfriedman at 6:29 PM on December 18, 2010 [1 favorite]


In the same vein as WTFhasObamaDoneSoFar.com....

http://sowhyiswikileaksagoodthingagain.com/

The site cycles through several of the big reasons.
posted by schyler523 at 6:35 PM on December 18, 2010 [4 favorites]


As of the latest count tonight, only 1,766 of the 251,287 cables have been released to the public yet. That's not even 1% of the cables!

Therefore, you may seriously want to revisit this question in another, say, three years, and see where we are then.

(However, if Assange ever releases the password to the "insurance" .torrent file, which has all the cables in it, unredacted and uncensored, then we'll get answers much quicker as millions of people simply run queries on the files looking for whatever keywords they're interested in.)
posted by Asparagirl at 6:56 PM on December 18, 2010 [1 favorite]


US Contractors peddling male child sex slaves to Afghani militia.
posted by yesster at 7:02 PM on December 18, 2010


Former Croatian PM actually frickin' arrested for corruption.
posted by rhizome at 7:19 PM on December 18, 2010


The Guardian's dedicated page for the US Embassy Cables is comprehensive and frequently updated.
posted by hot soup girl at 7:47 PM on December 18, 2010


yesster: "US Contractors peddling male child sex slaves to Afghani militia."

Cite?
posted by dancestoblue at 8:41 PM on December 18, 2010


Here is an article about contractors and "dancing boys". Background.
posted by TedW at 9:09 PM on December 18, 2010


Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths
posted by adamvasco at 3:50 AM on December 19, 2010


Salon gives the following list:
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me"); 
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation"; 
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961. 

In addition to this, there are stories such as that

A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young "dancing boys" to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and "quash" the story.
A top Shell executive's claims that company 'knows everything' about key decisions in Nigerian government ministries. She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
That the likes of Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America are happy to cut off services to organisations like WikiLeaks when it's politically expedient to do so.
posted by Mike1024 at 5:14 AM on December 19, 2010 [6 favorites]


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